I popped the rest of the cupcake in my mouth with a nod. As if that could fill the hole inside me, warm up that place where I kept all of my father’s words to me. I still had that letter to read and that gave me a bit of solace.
I guess for all the lying I have to do, all of the masks I wear, it’s strange that I’d put such stock in things like trust, loyalty, honesty. After all, it wasn’t as if I’d told Jason everything about myself either.
That didn’t matter to me though. I had higher expectations of him than I did of myself.
“What else did he say, Brynn?” His eyes were bright.
“I thought we were talking about the case?” My phone rang as I spoke and I answered, “Hill.”
“Get back to the Capri,” Captain Stratovich ordered. “The night shift found another pair of bodies.”
CHAPTER TWO
This killer surprised me.
Usually with a case like this it would be weeks or months before we saw another murder. Any other profiler would say he’d escalated and subconsciously, he wanted to be caught. Why else would he dump the bodies in the same place after the first pair had been discovered? Serials were ritualistic, but normally would move their dumping ground when discovered.
“This one is weird, Hill. Really fucking weird,” Grimes muttered as we climbed the stairs to the second floor of the Capri.
Weird? After all of the shit in the last forty-eight hours and he thought this was weird? Tracking a killer and trying to solve the murders were the most normal things out of the lot.
Once inside the room, the layout was almost identical to the previous scene. Right down to the way the flowers in their hair bound the bodies together and the cadavers were in the same condition—emaciated, appearing to have been dead for centuries.
All but for the faint glow of a tattoo on one woman’s wrist.
Three small dots like a pyramid.
She was MS-13.
The other female was Caucasian with no gang affiliation.
Fuck.
The only things that tied the two scenes together were the condition and placement of the bodies and two of the victims were MS-13.
“Do you see that?” Grimes asked as we neared the bodies, pointing right at the tattoos. The dots would have been almost imperceptible to the human eye, but Grimes saw them. “Did you see that on one of the other vics?”
Realization struck fast and hard. I knew the woman with the tattoo. “That’s Sarita. She’s the maid I talked to this morning.”
“Are you sure?”
“Am I ever not sure, Grimes?”
“You didn’t answer my question.” The expression on his face was one of blatant superiority. He already knew the answer to the question before he’d asked it.
“I didn’t put it in the report,” I muttered under my breath.
“Why not?”
“Because I know this isn’t gang-related and if the Captain sees two vics were gang members, he’ll kick it up to the gang task force to get it out of our department and these women will never have justice. I know this isn’t a gang thing, Grimes. In my gut.”
“I trust your gut the same as I’d trust my own, Brynn. But you don’t have all of the information,” he whispered in my ear.
Goddamn it. Really? How many more bombs was he going to drop on me in a week? What was it going to be this time? Leprechauns? A plague from some virus found only in four-eyed unicorn shit?
Motherfucker.
I sighed and looked up at him, his face had lost that smug look, his expression guarded, the faint lines around his eyes more prominent. It was something he didn’t want to tell me.
“Are you going to tell me or not?” I demanded impatiently when he didn’t continue.
“Later.” He looked away from me.
It pissed me off when he did that. Acted like he was some great oracle handing down prophecy whenever he had a good theory, but this was more than a theory. He was going to tell me something else that would fuck with my Chi or shatter my worldview. I’d rather just get it over with now.
I scrubbed my hands over my face. “You know I hate it when you do that.”
The corner of his mouth turned up in a smirk. “Yeah, I know.” He walked away from me to two nearby uniforms.
“I don’t know how you work with him,” Jenna said as she came through the door. “He’s too hot for his own good.”
“It’s like what men say about beautiful women. For each one there’s some man somewhere tired of her shit.”
Jenna laughed. “I’m sure it’s worse when they know how hot they are.”
Until the last few days, I’d never noticed Grimes that way. Everything else with a vagina seemed to, but he’d never affected me. “I keep him on the straight and narrow.”
“Shit.” Jenna sighed. I knew she wasn’t talking about Grimes.
“Yeah,” I agreed easily.
“We’re going to The Riot Room after this. I think we could all use a drink.”
“Or four.” I nodded. I wasn’t really a drinker. I’d go out with the group, nurse a whiskey or a beer, but I could never surrender that much control. Who knew what I’d say? Or what I’d do? But it was part of the culture of the job.
She opened her bag and pulled on her gloves. “You coming then?”
“Yeah.” I followed her over to the bodies. “Maybe we’ll see what it takes for you to get sick of Grimes?”
Yeah, hook Jason up with the only girlfriend I’d ever had. That’d get him and his damn smirk out of my head. And that vision of him barefooted in his sweatpants. There was something so intimate about that picture of him that it was more pornographic than if he’d been bare-assed naked.
“Oh no, honey. I’m happier with trolls. I know what makes them tick and I understand them. Men like Grimes are another breed. I’ll look at him because he’s pretty, but it’s kind of like looking at a five-carat diamond ring in the display window. Nice to daydream about, but not very practical or useful in real life.”
I laughed.
“Speaking of trolls,” she started.
Oh shit. She was going to try to set me up with one of her friends again. Dread was a brick in my gut. The dread wasn’t because she sucked at choosing men for me. She was quite good at it, actually. If I’d really been the person that I showed everyone, I could have been settled in the suburbs with two-point-five kids with a yard and a dog and teaching self-defense and the local YMCA by now. All the crap I knew I could never have and had convinced myself I didn’t want. Part of me would never understand how humans did it, how they walked around never knowing if someone they loved would take their next breath. It was an impossible way to exist.
“Jenna,” I admonished.
“Just meet him. If nothing else, give him the fuck of his life and be on about your business. You haven’t been out with anyone in a long time. I know batteries are no substitute for the real thing.”
Batteries? It took a moment for her implication to hit home. She was referring to self-pleasure. I wasn’t wired that way. My pleasure came from killing. And yet, since my life had been shoved on its ass sideways, I’d had those cravings for physical release. Maybe meeting her friend wouldn’t be such a bad idea?
“Fine.”
“Good.” She grinned. “He’ll be at The Riot Room tonight.”
We both turned our attention back to the bodies and I switched my awareness from interacting with humans to hunting monsters.
The bodies were in the same condition as the others at first glance. Sarita was on the left, just as her sister had been. What did that mean? If this really was gang related, was he saying that MS-13 was the left hand? Evil? Why target the women?
My brain spun slowly at first, increasing speed as wheels and gears began to turn in on each other devouring possibilities and spewing theories only to devour them again and spit out something else.
But none of it made sense. None of it had that click like metal puzzle pieces snapping together that I usually had in
these cases.
Sarita wasn’t a prostitute. She’d been a maid. So it wasn’t just whores. There’d been two other women as well and they weren’t MS-13. What was the connection?
I already knew that it wasn’t the women themselves that were the message, but I hoped there was something else that linked them together. Otherwise, we wouldn’t catch this fucker until he was ready to be caught.
Like my father, the thought came unbidden.
“Okay people, let’s get this scene processed as quickly as possible,” Captain Stratovich addressed the room. “We’ve got four bodies in less than forty-eight hours. So far, there’s been no radio traffic about this incident, but the sooner we’re out of here, the easier it will be to keep this quiet. If it gets out, there’ll be a citywide panic and that will make everyone’s job harder.” Then he turned to me and spoke in a lower tone. “What do you have for me?”
“Other than he’s a serial and doesn’t fit the standard profile?” I scrambled for something to offer him. “Grimes is working on something and he’s going to fill me in after the scene’s been processed.”
He nodded, a grave expression on his face. “I hate to rush genius, but we need answers.”
“I know. I won’t let you down, Captain.”
“I know you won’t,” he said, his voice much like my father’s when he told me he knew I’d make him proud. I’m sure it would “chap his ass” to know it, as he was so fond of saying, but Stratovich was more like my father than he would have been comfortable with.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. So far, these bodies hadn’t told me anything else about the killer. Maybe there was something about Sarita’s family specifically?
Their bloodline?
Their blood, a voice whispered to me. It’s in the red, the juice. The gushing rivers of crimson, hot and coppery sweet.
My head snapped up and I looked around the room for someone who didn’t belong. I’d heard the killer’s voice in my head as sure as if he’d been standing next to me. Tracking had never been like this. Sometimes, I got flashes, faint impressions, sometimes I could even see the scene through the killer’s eyes, but the echo of his desire had never been so loud.
We still didn’t know what exactly had killed the first two victims, but I was sure that there would be no blood in the bodies. Maybe no marrow either. I didn’t know the vehicle for the blood and marrow loss, but with the emaciated condition of the bodies, it wouldn’t be that long of a leap.
“The coroner hasn’t processed the first pair yet, has she?” I asked Jenna.
“She’s working on it now, why?”
“Ask her if the corpses are bloodless.”
“Why?” Jenna asked, making a face like she’d eaten something sour.
“If the corpses are bloodless, tell her to check for bone marrow loss as well.” In the blood, in the blood, in the blood, in the… Yes, I hear you. In the blood. Got it. Sometimes I wished I could shut that awareness off the same way I could my emotions. I could switch masks, turn myself into something that passed for human, but I could never fully tune out the other predators. “And for the vehicle in which they lost both. I think that’s going to be the cause of death.”
“You’re creepy as hell. You know that, right?” Jenna asked me in all seriousness.
I did at that. I was surprised she wanted to be my friend. She was another one of the masses of humans I could look at and remind myself why I had to do the things I did. Why I have to be what I am.
The last guy she’d dated had been a real piece of work. He’d taken advantage of her giving nature and he and I ended up having a discussion in a dark alley with my .40 in his mouth and his balls clenched in my fist. He wasn’t a killer, but he was a predator nonetheless. The only reason I didn’t kill him was so that he could pay back the money he owed Jenna and pay he did.
“So they tell me.” I shrugged and stepped back from the scene to let them work.
“Don’t forget. Ten o’clock,” Jenna reminded me. “And you might as well bring Grimes. We all like window shopping every now and then.”
Some people would think I was fucked up to be able to talk about my social life over two corpses, but it wasn’t just me. It was all of us. In this line of work, even good people have to become numb to the horror of the things around them if they want to function. If they want to keep dipping into the dark and putting the monsters in cages.
I looked around for Grimes, but didn’t see him. I’d have to catch up with him later to hear about whatever it was he was working on.
My eyes were drawn back to the bodies, to the fresh, star-like white blooms in their hair. I whipped out my phone and Googled the meaning of jasmine flowers.
In the Hindu religion jasmine flowers were used as altar decorations and offerings to symbolize divine hope.
I looked back at the bodies again and I didn’t see anything divine or hopeful about them, even looking with my other senses, looking at them as the killer would have.
The second result was for seduction. It was said that Cleopatra used jasmine oil to seduce Marc Antony. That was more likely than the first hit. The Chinese used it to treat headaches. The French used it for perfume. In Thailand, jasmine symbolized motherhood.
Finally, it was the entry under the Philippines that caught my eye. Couples used to exchange jasmine necklaces like wedding rings.
The blooms joined these women together, but it joined them with the killer too.
One single, metallic click echoed in my brain. Finally. There was a symbiosis here—hosts and parasite, they were intertwined. He consumed them; they were part of him now forever, like a marriage. He considered this to be an honor he’d bestowed on these women by allowing them to host his depravity, to feed him.
His hunger.
I still didn’t understand the MS-13 correlation. Maybe talking to Sarita and Carmen’s family would help me make the connection, if I could even get them to talk.
If I did the notification, they might talk to me, but I was never good with that kind of thing. I didn’t know how to behave, what was proper. I didn’t understand the grief process. I’d grieved for my father, but not like the women I’d seen wailing in the street over their dead children. It made me uncomfortable because I didn’t know which mask to wear.
Comfort was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I needed one sane thing in my life right now and this murder was it. I could throw myself into this case and do what I was meant to do and everything else would fall into place.
I hurried out to my car and flipped the file open to Sarita’s statement and copies of her employment records with the Capri. She lived on the northeast end of Prospect near I-435. That territory was shared by a number of Latin gangs including MS-13. Her emergency contact was her mother: Asuncion Montalvo. Same address.
The Hel Cycle sat in the passenger seat, the gold lettering bright and shiny under the streetlamp. I remembered the way the grooves of the letters felt beneath my fingertips, so inviting. I wanted to know what lay within those pages, but I wanted to find this killer more.
I put the car in gear and drove the short distance to Prospect. I took a big chance driving into that part of town without backup or a SWAT team behind me. They hated cops so much it was more likely they’d shoot me before they’d talk to me. Especially this time of night when business was just picking up. There were some uniforms who wouldn’t even respond to emergency calls in this neighborhood after dark.
It didn’t take long to find the address. I pulled to a stop in front of a small ranch-style home. The yard was neat and clean, but the house was painted a bright green. There were five cars in the driveway. All of them looked like something from The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. A group of young men sat in chairs in front of the single garage, drinking 40s and they were all tattooed from wrist to shoulder, some of them even on their faces. It was surreal, the glow coming off of most of the ink.
And the stench of sulfur hung heavy in the air.
When I stepped out of the c
ar, each one of them pulled their piece and had it trained directly on my skull.
“I’m not here to bust your balls, gentlemen.”
“Then what the fuck you doing off the reservation, piggy bitch?” One stepped forward. He was most likely an enforcer, not the leader. The glow of his tattoos actually obscured the image from this distance, so I couldn’t tell for sure, but the alpha of the group would be in the shadows, quiet. Polite. No trouble at all.
“Family notification. Does Asuncion Montalvo live at this address?”
“I’m her son and I’m right here, puta. So take that bullshit on down the street. You don’t have notification of shit.” They laughed.
From their behavior, I could tell they didn’t know about Carmen either. “I didn’t say it was her son.”
He stopped laughing and vaulted from his lawn chair. “Who?” he demanded.
“The name listed on the emergency contact was Asuncion Montalvo. Does she live here?” I asked again.
“She’s at work.”
He’d never talk to me with his boys present. If I told him about his sisters’ deaths, this would be the end of line. They’d never let me close enough to his mother to even have a chance at getting her to talk. I had to find a way to get in with him. Now.
“I’ll make you a deal.”
“We don’t deal with five-oh.”
At least he hadn’t called me a pig. It was a small thing, unconscious really, but showed me that he was open to hearing what I had to offer.
“This isn’t dealing with five-oh. It’s dealing with me.”
“What’s the difference, bitch?” Another man piped up from the chair next to where Asuncion’s son had been sitting.
“I wasn’t speaking to you, cabron.” I didn’t even turn my head to look at him when I spoke.
“What’s your deal?” the son asked.
A Siren's Song Page 2
